This is Chang's memoir/biography of her life and those of her mother and grandmother. Her grandmother had been a Manchurian concubine (and had bound feet) before the Kuomintang came to power. She then lived to see the Communists and Mao take over. Her mother, daughter of a warlord and accepted daughter of a doctor, lived most of her adult life under Mao, and was moved to Chengdu. Originally a minor official married to another minor official, they were then declared "capitalist roaders" and dealt with denunciations, beatings, etc, as part of Mao's constant upheavals to keep the populace infighting for power and food.

This book is quite terrifying and very frustrating and infuriating. What kind of leader starves his own populace in the name of building up industry? Or who deems education a bourgeois desire, wanting their populace to be illiterate and uneducated (yet expects to grow their industrial output?). Some of the language, though, is very MAGA-ish. Frightening. ( )

This biographical book follows three generations of women in one Chinese family, from feet binding to communism and beyond. In some ways it was very painful to read (and it is very long), but I could never put it down for very long. I learned so much from this book.

Any book that teaches me, changes my perception, astonishes me, and sticks with me the way this one did deserves five stars. ( )

Overall I liked this book. I was interesting learning about China in those times of upheaval through the personal history of three women in one family. From time to time it was also very depressing and hopeless, but that's something I expected, it is a consequence of the subject. I'm glad that one of the subjects of my grammar school exam for history was China's history, roughly from the 1940's to 1975-ish. And that period was exstensively described here. ( )

At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general, the police chief of a tenuous national government of China.

Quotations

With luck, one could fall in love after getting married

They had been brought up in the fanatical personality cult of Mao and the militant doctrine of "class struggle". They were endowed with the qualities of youth - they were rebellious, fearless, eager to fight for a "just cause", thirsty for adventure and action. They were also irresponsible, ignorant and easy to manipulate - and prone to violence.

When I came home that afternoon, I found my father in the kitchen. He had lit a fire in the big cement sink, and was hurling his books into the flames. This was the first time in my life I had seen him weeping. It was agonized, broken, and wild, the weeping of a man who was not used to shedding tears. Every now and then, in fits of violent sobs, he stamped his feet on the floor and banged his head against the wall.... My father had spent every spare penny on his books. They were his life. After the bonfire, I could tell that something had happened to his mind.

Last words

Information from the German Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.

In Wild Swans Jung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century. Chang's grandmother was a warlord's concubine. Her gently raised mother struggled with hardships in the early days of Mao's revolution and rose, like her husband, to a prominent position in the Communist Party before being denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself marched, worked, and breathed for Mao until doubt crept in over the excesses of his policies and purges. Born just a few decades apart, their lives overlap with the end of the warlords' regime and overthrow of the Japanese occupation, violent struggles between the Kuomintang and the Communists to carve up China, and, most poignant for the author, the vicious cycle of purges orchestrated by Chairman Mao that discredited and crushed millions of people, including her parents.